How to Create Impact in Today’s Media Centric Marketplace!
Go anywhere today: the mall, the airport, your local grocery store, the gym, or church, and look around. Most people are staring at their phones. In coffee shops, freelancers, students, and entrepreneurs huddle in front of their laptops. Desktop computers are the hub for the day’s business in the workplace. And in households, tablets, smart TVs, phones, and computers are part of daily life. There’s no question that in today’s complex media marketplace – digital reigns supreme.
With so many devices demanding attention, marketing for your organization requires some savvy thinking. To engage with today’s consumers, it’s important to understand how to reach, connect and engage with your audience daily, while keeping up with media channels as they seem to be multiplying at a fast pace.
To create the most impact in reaching today’s media centric world its important to understand how people engage and utilize media platforms.
Exploring Your Options in the New Media Marketplace
Once you have clarity on who your specific audience is, the next step is to identify the best media platform option(s). It’s no surprise, today’s media landscape is endless and continuously growing. Keeping up with an expanding digital marketplace, video development, and new audio realms is challenging. While maintaining a finger on all the markets may seem like a daunting task, remember that the ability to understand your audience will point you in the right direction. First, though, you need to know what’s available.
Video
Everyone watches video. Phones, tablets, smart TVs, and computers are all platforms that integrate video. There is endless opportunity for your organization. You just need to know where to look. Impressive stats show video programming on the rise. Most of the popular outlets – YouTube, Vimeo, and other services – encourage viewer interaction and engagement through likes, shares, and comments. Streaming video networks such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime can also be looped into this category.
Does your audience watch all their content on YouTube instead of network TV? Your next steps should focus on bringing great content to your audience there.
Mobile Search and Display Ads
In 2018, shoppers made more transactions on their phones than they did on desktops. According to Statista, 64% of searches are taking place on mobile devices. Mobile can now be considered its own channel.
Let’s pause here for a moment; don’t read past this too fast.
Mobile is essentially its own separate channel now that marketers can utilize texts, apps, and online display ads to share their message.
With ever-evolving, user-friendly interfaces, mobile potentially has the highest chance of attracting your audience. Successful media strategies use mobile platforms and display ads to create innovative concepts that produce a fully integrated campaign, yielding maximum impact to their audience.
Audio
Radio isn’t the only channel for audio today. Long live the podcast, the audio book, and satellite radio. All of these channels reach a particular audience. In particular, podcasting has become the new darling of the audio industry. The platform has grown to offer more than 700,000 podcasts that generate $1 billion in advertising revenue. Programmers have found a fascinating way to integrate traditional radio with the modern podcast. A current media buying strategy includes purchasing both short- and long-form radio time (80% of radio listening time is spent commuting), which then drives listeners to download and subscribe to their affiliated podcasts.
Social Media
Be sure to stay on top of how you can leverage the power of the social media platforms where you audience spends their time. Consider Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Each provides avenues for reaching your target audience organically and/or with paid ads. They have been around for a while now, and they evolve just as fast, if not faster, than the new channels that are popping up all the time. When your content moves people to action, these platforms put your audience in the position to immediately engage with your organization – whether they want to see the impact you are having in “real time” or make an online donation with just a few clicks. It’s powerful!
Programmatic
Of course, you have to keep track of all your appropriate ad buys, marketing strategies, and results. That’s a lot of work, which is why organizations utilize Programmatic. This service tracks your desired audience’s activity – their connection habits, devices, and channels – and places ads on multiple platforms at once based on their behavior. So, for example, if your target users are watching YouTube on a smartphone in the morning and perusing shopping results on a tablet before dinner, Programmatic will ensure that your message is delivered to the right device at the moment of greatest potential impact. And as audiences adopt new types of connected devices and consume content in new ways, Programmatic’s smart technology will adapt to those, too.
In the Age of New Media, Put People First
Of course, the number of views, engagement, conversion statistics, and ROI all matter when you’re fundraising for your organization. But the media you choose is just the means to an end – increased engagement, greater donations, and organization-wide growth.
Understanding your audience is the key to advertising success, even in the age of new media. Determine what will make your organization or fundraising campaign stand out for your audience. What will move them?
Once you’ve determined the message that will resonate, you can create a strategy that will reach your particular audience based on their behaviors, and then move them to action. It’s not easy – but it’s worth the effort.
As Van Mylar, V.P. of Client Strategy and Revenue Growth at Vision40 Media says, “There’s never been a more exciting time to be in marketing and media. New technologies, trends, and customer behaviors are transforming the industry at breakneck speed, creating copious opportunities for those who are able to keep up – or better still, get ahead of the curve.”
Are you ready for the future?
Let us know in the comment box what new media platforms you’ve tried and how it worked below in the comment box.
